Book Review

Edmund Burke III
and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds), The Environment and World History. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009. Pp.xvi + 361. $24.95
(paper)

Do we really
need another book on environmental history? Over the past thirty years, the
environment history bookshelf has become heavy with works by the likes of David
Christian, Alfred Crosby, Mike Davis, Jared Diamond, Brian M. Fagan,
Ramachandra Guha, J. S. McNeill, Anthony Penna, Clive Ponting, I.G. Simmons and
Vaclav Smil?1 Why add to the list?

A
brief acquaintance with world history texts and course curricula suggest one
reason: despite these works, environmental history remains marginalized,
appearing under subheadings like "The Columbian Exchange," "River Valleys and
the Rise of Civilization," or "Poor Harvests Lead to Revolution." Then it
disappears again. There is something almost operatic here: "The Environment" is
the clash of cymbals introducing an aria of doom and destruction. Once it's
done, we leave the theater and go back to the usual dramas of political and
social change. Kenneth Pomeranz gets it exactly right: "most world
history has continued to include the environment haphazardly and to foreground
it only when it cannot be avoided—as in the conquest of the
Americas—rather than to integrate it consistently into world-history
narratives" (3).

Kenneth
Pomeranz and Edmund Burke intend the articles in Environment and World
History as a corrective and a challenge. To understand what they had in mind
as they edited this volume, it's worth noting that the book appears in the
California World History Library, a series Burke and Pomeranz edit with
Patricia Seed for the University of California Press. The series aspires to "to enlarge the conversation among
scholars and teachers pursuing world history of different kinds and in
different institutional settings by publishing scholarly works informed by a
world history perspective as well as books for classroom use."2

The
series has indeed "enlarged the conversation." Its titles include volumes
examining history at vast scales of space and time, of which David Christian's Maps
of Time is perhaps the most ambitious. Yet Burke, Pomeranz and Seed have
also published case studies focused on more narrowly conceived eras and
locales. Sebastian Conrad's reconsideration of postwar German and Japanese
historiography and Ilham Khursi-Makdisi's study of socialist and anarchist
activism in the pre-World War I Middle East make explicit connections between
the particular and the general.

Like
the entire series, The Environment and World History has selected work
representative of environmental history at a regional as well as a global
scale. Taken together, these articles indeed "enlarge the conversation
among scholars and teachers" about the relationship between the human and
natural worlds.

1.

Pomeranz and
Burke frontload the collection with three wide-lens perspectives. Pomeranz's
introductory "World History and Environmental History" can serve particularly
well as a reference when reframing a world history curriculum to incorporate a
greater environmental emphasis. The collection here will, he promises, point
towards a narrative based around a "developmentalist project" dating back at
least three centuries and characterized by "commitments to state-building,
sedentariation, and intensifying… exploitation of resources." The phrase
"developmentalist project" is reminiscent of an older
term—"modernization"—but the term does not seem out of place here.
Since the 1950s, disputes over that word's meanings have never been far from
the center of world history practice. To argue that any debate over
modernization requires a careful look at environmental history seems completely
sensible (7).

Edmund
Burke's "The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment"
makes the argument for putting this "developmentalist project" at the center of
world history narratives. Recapitulating themes most recently developed by
Vaclav Smil and David Christian, Burke constructs a world history narrative
around extraction of energy from the environment. In this telling, the
transition to fossil fuels constitutes a more decisive break in human history
than any since the adoption of agriculture. Is the 19th–20th-century
fossil fuel revolution actually a materialist's Axial Age? One could debate
that proposition, and doing so would certainly enliven a classroom. Which
candidate for "Biggest Shift in Human History" deserves the prize? The
philosophic and religious universalism of the Classical Age? The 16th–18th-century
creation of Atlantic and Pacific worlds? The dawn of the fossil fuel era?

Burke
and Pomeranz dedicate Environment and World History to the late John
Richards, whose essay "Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land," is
the third of the "big history" trio. If "energy regimes" are central to Burke's
narrative, "property regimes" are central to Richards':

Over
the past six centuries, every human society has moved toward a similar regime
of rights in landed property. Bewilderingly complex, particularized, local
systems of property rights in land have been altered, transformed, or replaced
by simplified, more uniform sets of rules in a remarkably similar fashion
across all world regions. Paradoxically, however, these converging
property rules have helped to establish more precise, exact, nuanced, and
complex rights over individual parcels of land. This trend reflects the intensifying
manipulation and use of smaller and smaller units of land, within land markets
of increasing transparency and efficiency (55).

Richards here
works the same vineyard as anthropologist James Scott, arguing that as states
have grown in power over the last several centuries, they have imposed rules
requiring more uniform property ownership, usage and valuation to render each
individual parcel and person "visible" to the state's administrative apparatus.
In Scott's version, this process has culminated with 20th-century
"high modernism"–the uniformity of urban and rural space dictated by the
state most notoriously under Stalin but echoed everywhere from Nyerere's
Tanzania to Le Corbusier's drawing board.3

Less
drawn than Scott to the extreme cases (not every state is Stalinist), Richards
is free to ask how privatized property regimes have configured urban space,
defined national identity and structured social relationships worldwide. The
idea of a "property regime" stands at the intersection of the natural and the
built environments, between culture and economics, and amid a welter of social
structures and social theories. It demonstrates the power of environmental
history to illuminate world history as a whole.

Of
the first three essays, Richards' is the most difficult to translate into
classroom practice. While the enclosure movement has long been a staple of
western civilizations courses, I doubt that most students understand its causes
and consequences as deeply as Richards (or Scott) would want. One possible
method: carefully selecting current events for debate. Disputes over real
property run like a bright thread through the news. The U.S. debate over
eminent domain (particularly Kelo v. New London) or the Brazilian
contest between ranchers and the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Landless Workers Movement) can lay the groundwork for
historical discussions.

2.

From global
frameworks, Environment and World History turns to two sets of case
studies, devoting the first of these to water. Long before anyone coined the
phrase "environmental history," the "river valley" was a classroom mainstay.
For decades, textbooks have contended that differences between ancient Egyptian
and Mesopotamian cultures arose because the Nile flooded a narrow valley with
predictable regularity while Tigris-Euphrates flooded a broad plain
catastrophically. Turning to China, the history texts of previous decades would
then invoke Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic thesis" and its argument that the need
for large-scale irrigation empowers certain states to grow despotic. Pomeranz
allows that while Wittfogel's thesis contains a "kernel of truth" it has
largely been discredited (89, 121).

Introduced
in world history textbooks as a grand explanatory machine that propelled the
rise of civilizations, the river valley inexplicably vanishes from those same
textbooks just as soon as the "ancient world" morphs into the classical.
Evidently, civilizations are born thirsty, outgrowing their need for water as
they mature. The weaning-of-civilizations narrative gets a comeuppance here
thanks to essays on the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile over the last 3500 years
(Burke), the Yellow and Yangtze over the past five centuries (Pomeranz), the 18th–20th-century
Rhine (Marc Cioc) and the "colonial rice frontiers" of the Southeast Asia's
Irawaddy, Chao Phraya, and Mekong rivers since the mid-18th century
(Michael Adas).

Burke
("The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E to 2000
C.E.") does not concern himself strictly with natural rivers, but broadly with
water management techniques. He contends that, "most histories of the modern
Middle East regard the environment as a source of backwardness, which only the
application of modern science and technology can overcome." The arc of Middle
East history is thus reduced to a very ancient apogee followed by a long and
uninterrupted decline. Such imaginings, Burke writes, are "modernist
fables" (81).

Burke's
version of events is quite a bit more complicated. In sum, complex urban societies
emerged in the Middle East because they developed sophisticated adaptations to
flooding and drought. Over time, siltation, salinization and shifting river
courses lessened the success of these adaptations. Then, beginning in the 7th and 8th centuries, an "Islamic green revolution" (Burke borrows the
term from Andrew Watson) restored and expanded Middle Eastern productivity. At
the core of this revolution, under the Abbassid Caliphate, was a vast Islamic
cultural territory open to exchange of new crops and such hydraulic
technologies as the windmill and the underground canal (Iran's qanat).
Yet applying this "hydraulic toolkit" to entire regions required a secure state
and large workforces. Plague, warfare and declining tax revenues exposed the
vulnerabilities of these systems.

Though
the "gunpowder empires" of the 16th–18th centuries
remained formidable, these empires operated at the limits of their
environmental endowments. So too did states in Europe and East Asia. However,
European states were able to supplement their own endowments with those of the
New World and, gradually, to insert themselves into Indian Ocean commerce. The
Ottoman and Safavid/Qajar empires could not pursue this strategy. And while
China pursued "intensive colonization of a resource-rich … interior," the
Middle East as a whole was "the legatee of ancient empires that had exploited
the same resource base for millennia, with diminishing returns" (93). It is
difficult now to imagine the Middle East as resource poor, but the 18th–19th-century
fossil fuels revolution excluded the Middle East: there was no coal to be had
in either the Ottoman or Qajar territories.

It
is against this background that the Ottoman Empire, Khedival Egypt, Qajari
Persia and their 20th-century successor states sought to westernize
their economies rapidly, a process Philip Curtin called "defensive
modernization."4
Whatever their successes and failures, these projects resulted in a "flayed
environment." Far from representing a failed past, Burke concludes, the Middle
East presages the world's future (110).

Kenneth
Pomeranz ("The Transformation of China's Environment, 1500–2000") is less
pessimistic about prospects for China than Burke is for the future of the
Middle East. The story of China's recent economic growth is well known,
and Pomeranz finds its "environmental implications mixed." Like Mahesh
Rangajaran's essay on South Asia later in the volume, Pomeranz does not
consider massive urbanization and industrialization an environmental disaster.
Even at a sixth of U.S. per capita income (a figure admittedly in dispute),
China has, for example, brought life expectancy to "levels close to those in
the West." Given China's calamitous century-and-a-half from late Qing through
the disasters associated with Mao, the current regime's commitment to
development over environment is, at least, understandable (151).

Pomeranz
stresses continuity, not calamity. Expanding on themes developed in The
Great Divergence, he argues that even contemporary policies are "shaped in
part by a late imperial political economy"5 whose characteristics included:

(1) a preference for
keeping large numbers of people in the countryside, and
for encouraging rural industry… (2) notions of statecraft in which the
central government actively props up… economically and ecologically
vulnerable [regions], while intervening less in the economies of
richer areas (except to tax them); and (3) a set of material conditions
powerfully shaped by these notions that has given environmental protection
a rather different significance in China than in liberal traditions
(119).

In practice,
this meant that the Chinese state intervened frequently to control land use
(particularly through tax policy), identifying the state's security with
"supporting access for all to some resources considered central to subsistence
and… [promoting] specific kinds of production felt to be socially and
culturally uplifting... This undertaking required stable family life… in a
world of independent farming households" (122).

To
achieve that aim, the Chinese state invested heavily in transportation, flood
control (particularly in the Yellow River) and irrigation projects
(particularly in north China). The productive lower Yangzi River, linked by the
Grand Canal to north China, relieved that region from the costs of provisioning
Beijing while contributing to the state's coffers. Maintaining the
infrastructure necessary to keep the system functioning was not cheap. Though
much of this work was handled locally, often by farmers themselves, the state
managed most costly and complex projects." By 1821," Pomeranz writes, "the
maintenance of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River consumed between 10 and 20
percent of government spending" (125).

However,
in Pomeranz's telling, the country's deepest problems reflected (to use a term
Pomeranz avoids) market distortions. The most productive
regions—particularly the lower Yangzi—could not make the transition
to commercial and perhaps industrial production because the state raked in some
of the region's surplus in taxes while promoting less efficient competitors
elsewhere in the country.

The
19th century exposed China's vulnerability. War and rebellion
diluted the country's tax base, undermining its infrastructure of levees, dikes
and canals. Meanwhile, successive Chinese governments were forced to redirect
their spending to meet European and Japanese threats. While British imperialism
seriously wounded the Qing, policies that had long worked well weakened the
state before the British arrived.

This
is, largely, a story about how the Chinese state (at both the imperial and
local levels) structured its legal, tax, commercial and defense policies around
assumptions about land use. In this context, Pomeranz argues, the state did
seek to protect the landscape, perhaps more than any of its peers. For the
Qing, the most natural landscape was one of small family plots. The two
poles of Western environmental thought—a war against nature (a theme in
Mark Cioc's essay on the Rhine) versus natural preservation—made little
sense if "nature" consisted of small family plots.

Pomeranz's
essay is the book's longest, and easily deserves a review of its own.
That said, it would daunt and probably confuse students new to world history.
One strategy for bringing it into the classroom: divide the last half of the
chapter among three to four student groups. Those groups could then present
their summaries sequentially or integrate them in a "jigsaw" assignment. It
would be hard to find a better introduction to the environmental context for
China's 19th–20th century history.6

While
Pomeranz and Burke reveal environmental continuities in Middle Eastern and
Chinese histories, Mark Cioc ("The Rhine as a World River") sees the Rhine's
history as one marked by abrupt and sweeping change. In Cioc's account, the
contemporary Rhine bears little resemblance to the river of two centuries ago: "used
simultaneously for transportation, industrial production, urban sanitation and
energy production," the Rhine is now "one of the most biologically degraded
streams in the world" (166). What happened? Essentially, by the early 19th century, states along the Rhine had come to believe that the river's geography
interfered intolerably with the needs of commerce and (a bit later) industry.
Drawing from a rigidly rationalist and economically expedient approach to
riverine engineering rooted in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, governments
straightened and dredged the river, lined its channels with concrete,
simplified its delta, drew its water for factories along its banks, and poured
effluent back in. So much for Wagner's Rhinemaidens!

Like
the rest of the collection, "The Rhine" has a story to tell about
state-building and property. In a Puckish riff on Wittfogel's hydraulic thesis,
Cioc writes that while we may have consigned "oriental despotism" to the trash
bin, the Rhine reveals "something akin to an 'occidental despotism'" (184). The
governments that remade the Rhine awarded themselves and their corporate
legatees enormous power to reconfigure the valley at the expense of towns and
rural communities along its course. They did not do so entirely alone: Cioc
tells here the story of the Commission for Rhine Navigation, founded in 1815,
the "oldest continuous interstate institution in Europe" and a precursor to
mid-20th century European projects (168).

The
Rhine quickly became a model for the assassination of rivers throughout the
world. Those who have lived in Los Angeles—where the major "river" is
largely a concrete-lined sluice whose waters flow from the Tillman water
treatment plant's discharge pipes—will have little trouble connecting the
dots between the Rhine's history and that of their own home. Many students will
likewise be able to find in local landscapes some evidence of projects
influenced by the Rhine's transformation.

A
river's concrete embankment is unmistakable evidence of human will, the
consequence of urban and industrial planning. We tend to see rural landscapes
with a very different sensibility. I recently came across a website promoting
travel to Bali. The caption: "Nature Walk – Discover Beautiful Rice Paddy
Fields." Beautiful? Yes. Natural? Well…

Before
the 19th century, Michael Adas writes (in "Continuity and
Transformation: Colonial Rice Frontiers"), Southeast Asia's great river deltas
were "sparsely populated, frequently flooded [regions] covered with mangrove
swamps and monsoon rain forests" (192). By the early 20th century,
they had become rice granaries feeding urbanized populations well beyond the
region. This episode in Southeast Asian history (actually, any episode
in Southeast Asian history) gets little play from world history texts and
course outlines. Yet it both underwrote Asia's urban expansion and drew its
peoples deeply into the global economy. Adas invites global comparisons of this
expanding "colonial rice frontier" to plains of the US and Canada, Argentine pampas,
and the flatlands of the Ukraine.

Colonial
governments congratulated themselves for the rapid and dramatic remaking of
Southeast Asia's lower river basins, much as they congratulated themselves for
domesticating the Rhine. Yet, Adas finds, the stories were quite different. To
be sure, European investors and colonial authorities played a significant role
in adapting the landscapes of the Mekong and Irawaddy to rice cultivation.
Along the Chao Phraya, however, the Siamese state (also consolidating its
power) encouraged the same development. However, the state did not act alone:
peasants migrating into these rice frontiers from the interior river valleys
cleared land, built and maintained irrigation works, and developed complex
communities which were opaque to the administrative gaze.

Unlike
Cioc—but very much like Pomeranz—Adas does not consider the
wholesale remaking of these regions an altogether bad thing. Intensive wet rice
cultivation was "in many ways… the most optimal form of large-scale economic
development then available" and "by far one of the most productive modes of
generating a staple food… [and] far less disruptive of existing ecological
systems than many other processes of agricultural expansion and frontier
settlement" (201).

Yet,
as Adas adds, it was not without its problematic consequences. Of these, one
has particular political and social consequences: cultivators become very
vulnerable when they become dependent on the world price for a single
commodity. No wonder that "rice monoculture… has been a major contributor to
the socioeconomic and political crisis that have recurred in all these delta
regions from the late 1920s onward." Here is an invitation to consider the ways
that comparable rural transformations have shaped political and social
histories (203).

3.

"Landscapes,
Conquests, Communities, and the Politics of Knowledge" is the somewhat ungainly
title chosen for the collection's third set of essays by regional specialists
on Africa (Peter Beinart), India (Mahesh Rangajaran), Latin America (Lisa
Sedrez), and Russia (Douglas Weiner). Obviously, these contributions each focus
on a familiar regional construct of the sort Martin Lewis and his colleagues
criticized in Myth of Continents.7 Though using the old regions as units of world history analysis can mislead, it
is a simple fact that most historians specialize in a particular region, not in
world history. As Pomeranz comments, the findings of area studies specialists
"remain essential points of departure" for developing a global environmental
history. A title like "Area Studies and Global Environmental History" needs no
apology (4).

That
said, roping these regions together does evoke Immanuel Wallerstein's "modern
world system" in which, by the mid-19th century, a Euro-American
capitalist core had coerced or subsumed the rest of the world into
relationships characterized as "semi-peripheral" (i.e., Latin America and
Russia) or "peripheral" (India and sub-Saharan Africa). Readers expecting these
essays to contain a grand narrative of environmental decline—ranging from
rationalized property regimes to intensively engineered landscapes to
uncontrolled urbanization, biodiversity loss, and the degradation of air, water
and soil as the ruinous consequence of globalized capital—will be
disappointed. The authors in question offer nothing so simple.

Writing
on South Asia, Mahesh Rangarajan takes particular exception to an "East/West
dichotomy… that sheds no light on colonial rule or its impact." For one thing,
the Mughal Empire and its predecessors in India manipulated the landscape as
far as their power would allow. The Mughal Empire was thus one of many "states
dependent on land-based revenues [that] had long tried to extend their reach
into forest and hill areas." Like other states, the Mughal Empire "bore
down heavily on the nomadic tribes of the hilly and deltaic regions," remaking
landscapes in the process (232). Further, "no student of South Asia's
environmental record can possibly ignore the fissures and cracks in the colonial
state." If environmental history were reduced to melodrama (something
Rangarajan avoids), then British colonial administrators might occasionally be
cast as environmental heroes (242).

That
said, "there were profound differences between the Raj and its predecessors."
Change came "in two phases: first with the policing, disarming, and
sedentarization of itinerant peoples, and then with the sequestering of forest
and the expansion of canal irrigation" (246). On the whole, wildlife certainly
suffered in a region increasingly characterized by "a village-centered peasant
economy and new commercialization of forest lands." By 1900, the Raj had
sequestered a fifth of British India into government forest–"a huge shift
in property relations" (237). Yet colonialism's distinct features grew out of
"specific victories and calamities, of historically evolving processes, not out
of a morality play that opposed East and West, science and local knowledge, the
modern and the traditional" (234, 245).

What
made the British Empire so much more transformative than its predecessors? If
British colonial impact was greater, it is because Britain's global network
drew on "sources of power outside the region. It was thus more insulated from
the pressures within the subcontinent than previous regimes" (237). As a
result, it did not have to continue the "fluid and flexible" relationships
between the Mughal Empire and local actors.

Rangarajan's
analytical cool should not be mistaken for colonial apologetics. No
qualifications, he writes, "can disguise the reality of the severe impact of
colonial policy in the decisive decades of the nineteenth century." British
policies led directly to the "marginalization of "peasants, keepers and
breeders of livestock, fisher folk, and artisans." These consequences
"facilitated the rise of market- and state-oriented patterns of production,
which were and are more ecologically disharmonious than the systems they
supplanted" (238, 240). Yet, after 1947, few other independence leaders wanted
the small-scale village economies that Mohandas Gandhi idealized. Rangarajan
tells us that Bhimrao Ambedkar, hero of a movement to grant dalit (untouchables) full rights under the Indian constitution, supported the Damodar
Valley Authority, a TVA-style project intended to provide hydroelectricity to
Indian factories. Ambedkar hoped that "waged work in modern industry" would
liberate "those born into a menial caste" from their rural poverty (244).

Like
Rangajaran, William Beinart (Africa) and Lisa Sedrez (Latin America) are both
at pains to demonstrate that recent environmental history has moved some
distance beyond inherited conquest-and-decline narratives. To make that clear,
Beinart titles his contribution "Beyond the Colonial Paradigm" while Sedrez
subtitles hers "A Shifting Old/New Field." These are, in effect, reviews of
recent literature in the field. Students new to world history are unlikely to
find them useful. They are more valuable for advanced students, particularly
those who need a bibliographic overview before launching into specific
sources.

While
neither Beinart nor Sedrez offer a central argument, their essays are rich in
comparisons that might be integrated into a world history curriculum. Both, for
instance, stress the importance of frontiers. Since the emergence of the "new
Western history" movement in the United States, much has been made of reframing
the frontier as a region of interaction rather than the edge of conflict. There
are, Beinart and Sedrez find, plenty of opportunities to do so in African and
Latin American histories. William Beinart, for example, asks that we
"understand that Africans, and especially Bantu-speaking black Africans, were
migrants and colonizers in the continent." With them came "techniques,
livestock and crops" developed in west and central Africa and then tested
against and adapted to new environments. Sedrez (who uses the term "encounters"
rather than "frontiers") highlights research on relationships between the
"dominant society and other traditional but nonindigenous groups such as quilombos (runaway slaves), fishing communities, and rubber tappers" (265). Like
Rangajaran, Sedrez and Beinart stay well away from the overt moral outrage that
once seethed in earlier environmental histories and which seethes still in Mike
Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts.

Douglas
Weiner ("The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding
Russian Environmental History") shows no such reluctance. There is no doubt
about where he stands:

The
core of this argument is simple. At least since the Mongol-Tatar invasion of
the thirteenth century, and particularly with the rise and expansion of the
Muscovite state, and later, the Russian Empire and the USSR, a succession of
militarized, predatory tribute-taking regimes have dominated the Eurasian land
mass… Unbounded by the rule of law (although constrained somewhat by
custom), these regimes saw the population and the land over which they ruled as
a trove of resources to be
mined for the rulers' purposes. At times, those purposes have sounded
noble: defense of the one true faith, the ingathering of the dispersed Russian
ethnos, the creation of a just, classless society, or the engineering of a
transition to a "liberal, democratic, free-market society." Nevertheless,
high-minded purposes have not overshadowed the rulers' cold understandings of
the prerequisites of maintaining power… Russia's
rulers have spared neither people nor land (276–277).

Weiner's bite is
as sharp as his bark. His essay recapitulates the whole of Russian history,
cataloguing eight centuries of exploitative and destructive policies. His tone
recalls a very different genre of academic work: the anti-dictatorship
manifesto, reminiscent of Ghanaian economist George Ayittey's denunciations of
African "vampire states." 8 Like Ayittey, it is love that motivates Weiner's jeremiad. His last several
pages, which enumerate and then reject reasons for environmental hope in
post-Soviet Russia, read like the account of a failed affair (well, an affair
whose betrayed lover is tenured faculty): "The nihilistic costing calculus of
the predatory tribute-taking state is still in place… a second Chernobyl simply
waiting to happen" (304–307).

Alone
of the four essays in this section, Weiner's could be fed whole to most students.
But the others should not be ignored. A reading of all four suggests
cross-regional comparisons—some of which are mentioned below—that
can remake world history curriculum.

4.

In his
introductory remarks, Pomeranz laments the absence of a narrative common to
environmental and world historians. Obviously, no common narrative is going to
emerge from a collection of eleven essays from nine historians, though there
are clearly common threads tying together two, three or more of these essays.
Apart from the "developmentalist project," these might, for instance, include
the idea of the "frontier": Adas's rice frontier, Beinart's frontier of Bantu
migration, and Pomeranz's Chinese territorial periphery. Another common theme,
perhaps, is the tension between local knowledge of the environment (what James
Scott calls metis) and the technocratic-scientific expertise offered (or
imposed) by state and corporate planners. Though these days our sympathies with
corporate and state have both worn thin, it may be well to recall, as Pomeranz
points out regarding China, that the local knowledge cherished by local
officials and elites sometimes works to the detriment of broader environmental
goals.

At
the same time, one could wish that three other topics had each gotten an essay
of its own. One such topic: how environmental issues impact gender. Though
Beinart, Pomeranz, Rangarajan, and Sedrz mention this in passing, the
collection's emphasis on modernization and state building often bypasses social
history. This lacuna is hardly unique to The Environment and World History. Writing
of the United States, Elizabeth Blum recently observed that,"the historiography
of women's involvement in the environment suffers from numerous gaps." Ulrike
Strasser and Heidi Tinsman found a similar bifurcation in Latin America between
studies that would tie that region more closely to global political and
economic narratives and those that would—usually through localized
scholarship—unpack issues of gender.9

A
second issue is the relationship of environmental degradation to contemporary
global poverty. It is Mike Davis's contention that global environmental
degradation all but engineered for the sake of imperial agendas was central to
the "making of the third world." It has become a commonplace belief that
desertification immiserated millions in the Sahel, a view generally questioned
by more conservative writers who blame poverty on dysfunctional and overweening
states. What is the relationship between environmental cause and effect? While
it is possible to glean bits and pieces from these essays, a focused assessment
would be valuable.

Surprisingly,
there is little said here about environmental politics. Some teachers (though
probably few students) will have heard of India's peasant-based Chipko movement,
Brazil's assassinated activist Chico Mendes, or Tanzania's Nobel Prize winning
Wangari Maathal. Illumination of their work and that of their predecessors
would be welcome. So too would a sense for the ways "the environment" motivated
political activism in the decades before "environment" entered the common
vocabulary. Weiner and Pomeranz do ask whether environmental movements in
Russia and China will gain more power going forward (the answer's "no" for
Weiner's Russia and "maybe" in Pomeranz's China). Still, the roots of global
environmental movements remain obscure.

No
anthology can do it all, and this one is much better than most. As world
history instructors plan their courses over the coming years, they would be
well off turning to the good counsel Kenneth Pomeranz, Edmund Burke and their
colleagues offer in The Environment and World History.

Tom Laichas teaches at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. He is the author, for
the National Center for History in the Schools, of "Infinite Patience,
Indomitable Will: Ralph Bunche and his Struggle for Peace and Justice" and
writes regularly on world history education for World History Connected and other publications. He can be reached at tlaichas@gmail.com.

Notes

1 A fine collective bibliography at the
end of The Environment and World History catalogs over 300 of the most
significant essays and books in the field. Of the writers mentioned above, see
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press 2005); Alfred Crosby, The Columbian
Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th anniversary edition (Praeger, 2003) and Ecological Imperialism: The
Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd edition (Cambridge
University Press, 2004); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño
Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2002); Jared Diamond, Guns,
Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton, 1997) and Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail (Penguin, 2005); Brian Fagan, The
Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (Basic Books, 2001) as
well as Floods Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations, revised edition (Basic Books, 2009) and The Great Warming: Climate
Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (Basic Books, 2008);
Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Longman, 2009); J.
S. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World (Norton, 2001) and Mosquito Empires: Ecology and
War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010);
Anthony Penna, Nature's Bounty: Historical and Modern Environmental
Perspectives (M.E. Sharpe, 2009) and The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental
History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Clive Ponting, A New Green History of
the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, revised
edition (Penguin, 2007); I.G. Simmons, Changing the Face of the Earth:
Culture, Environment, History, 2nd edition (Wiley-Blackwell,
1996) and Global Environmental History (University of Chicago Press,
2008); Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Westview Press,
1994).

5 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great
Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Pomeranz,
"China's Environment," EWH, 153.

6 The four sections are: "Limits of
Growth-and of Late Imperial Statecraft" (128–136); "The People's Republic:
(How) Did it the Revolution Matter?" (136–142), "Hydropower and China's Far
West" (142–147) and "China and the Global Environment at the Millennium: Do the
Differences Still Matter?" (147–153)

7 Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigan, The
Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1997).

9 Elizabeth D. Blum "Linking American
Women's History and Environmental History: A Preliminary Historiography"
accessed May 6, 2011, http://www.h-net.org/~environ/historiography/uswomen.htm; Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman,
"It's a Man's World? World History Meets the History of Masculinity, in Latin
American Studies, For Instance" Journal of World History 21:1 (March
2010), 75–96.

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